Tag Archives: “burundi elections”

It was not a pretty weekend in everyone’s favorite, dysfunctional, nominally democratic Great Lakes autocracy. (Whoops! Second favorite.) The fallout over Burundi’s disputed elections last week began as soon as the official results were announced on Friday, with President Pierre Nkurunziza’s CNDD-FDD party claiming a convincing 64.03 percent of the votes. The former rebel group, FNL, was a distant second, with just over 14 percent.

On Friday, the opposition parties “expressed outrage at the official results and demanded the resignation of the national electoral board.”

“Our position is crystal clear: we are still demanding the May 24 elections be invalidated and we also want the electoral commission to resign because it is not independent,” said FNL leader Agathon Rwasa.

He was speaking in the name of 12 opposition parties at a press conference held immediately after the annnouncement of the official results.

International observers, as I reported last week, were generally pleased with the outcome, if only because it wasn’t half as farcical as last month’s Ethiopian polls.

Meanwhile the United Nations’ independent expert on the human rights situation in Burundi, Akich Okola,

interviewed observers in Burundi to evaluate the elections. He said as far as he can see, the results reflect the will of the people. But he added that the necessary evidence might not be available to him.

“This is the third democratic elections that this country has held,” said Okola. “I was privileged to observe the second democratic elections in 2005 and this third series in this democratic process I think is indicating that Burundi is slowly maturing into a democratic state.”

Of course, that slow maturation process won’t come without some growing pains. And things quickly became painful this weekend, when violence erupted in Bujumbura during opposition protests over the contested results.

The opposition National Liberation Forces (FNL) said people began demonstrating in Bujumbura’s Kinama quarter when they found “several ballot boxes filled with balloting papers, some of them not counted.”

“The people protested and the policed intervened,” said party spokesman Jean-Bosco Havyarimana, adding that senator Petronie Habanabashaka and 50 party activists were taken in by police.

A police spokesman denied that the senator had been arrested, but a local official said that elsewhere in Bujumbura, things quickly began to spiral out of control. According to administrator Emile Ndayarinze:

“Election commission agents were collecting election material used in Monday’s vote. A large crowd arrived and started hurling stones at these agents and police fired in the air to disperse the crowd,” he said.

This was followed by a “real riot — the Kinama market was looted and was closed in the afternoon, police and civilians were wounded and a dozen ringleaders were arrested,” he said.

The violence escalated on Sunday, when a local leader from the opposition Union for Peace and Development (UPD) party was killed by a grenade blast in Muyinga province.

“At 16:00 GMT the UPD’s deputy chair in Buhinyuza commune, Asumani Nzeyimana, was talking to some people when someone in police uniform threw a grenade at them. It exploded and caused him fatal injuries,” said [party spokesman] Chauvineau Mugwengezo.

“Nzeyimana succumbed to his injuries while six other party activists were seriously wounded and are in hospital,” he said of the Sunday incident.

The spokesperson also said another local party leader narrowly missed death on Sunday after two men in civilian clothing shot at him.

“In both cases these are political crimes linked to the elections and ordered by the regime,” he said.

Ruling party officials denied any political motives behind the attacks, but Mugwengezo insisted both men “were investigating the fraud that characterised last Monday’s local elections, notably the ballot box stuffing we’ve seen everywhere.”

On Monday, in the campaign season’s latest twist, FNL leader Agathon Rwasa and four other presidential candidates announced they were withdrawing from this month’s polls in protest over the results of last week’s elections.

“I came to withdraw my candidacy in the June 28 presidential poll because I refuse to take part in a fraudulent election whose results are already decided,” Rwasa told AFP at the electoral board office.

This is troubling news, since despite the optimism and assurances of international observers last week, the political situation in Burundi appears to be rapidly deteriorating. Let’s not forget the high level of risk involved in this sort of brinkmanship: both the ruling party and the main opposition party (CNDD-FDD and FNL, respectively), are former rebel groups who spent more than a decade fighting in Burundi’s disastrous civil war, and who are believed to be armed to the teeth. UPD – another prominent opposition party – is itself a CNDD-FDD splinter group, widely considered to have stockpiles of arms. And even minor political players, like FRODEBU and MSD, have drawn discontented, demobilized rebel soldiers into their ranks. The widespread clashes in the weeks leading up to last week’s elections, however minor, have illustrated just how volatile the political climate is in Burundi right now. Let’s hope the gains of the past five years aren’t undone in the days and weeks ahead.

As the week comes to a close, and President Pierre Nkurunziza’s ruling party revels in its landslide victory on Monday, mixed news out of Burundi on just how CNDD-FDD wound up with 70 percent of the votes.

Opposition parties rallied to protest the election results.

As I reported earlier this week, a coalition of eight opposition parties released a statement on Monday, urging the electoral commission “to take a wise decision and annul the elections and organize other communal elections on 28 June, the same day as presidential elections.” They alleged widespread intimidation and fraud, as well as a number of irregularities surrounding the ballot boxes.

Speaking on behalf of the protesting political parties, Chevineau Mugwengezo, spokesman of the Union pour la paix et le developpement (UPD), told IRIN: “Some ballot boxes were taken home and only returned [to the polling stations] the next day.”

Electoral bodies, I’m sure, alleged that this was only for safe-keeping.

A possibly tainted vote being cast this week.

FNL spokesman Jean-Bosco Habyarimana, according to the same IRIN report, “said postponing the communal poll twice gave the ruling party time to corrupt and intimidate voters.”

“How can you explain that on a given hill, a party like the FNL’s score does not even get to the number of its committee members?” he questioned.

Meanwhile Onesime Nduwimana, the spokesman for the ruling party, told IRIN on 26 May that voting had been closely monitored by local and international media, observers and representatives of political parties.

“In minutes from polling stations, co-signed by representatives of political parties without any reservation, no single irregularity was reported,” Nduwimana said.

“In the 95.6 percent of polling stations monitored by the EU observers, they assessed that the voting system was very good or good. And in 42.9 percent of polling stations, the observers judged that the vote-counting was very good or good,” Renate Weber, head of the EU’s observers’ mission, told Reuters.

It wasn’t entirely clear how less-than-good vote-counting in 57.1 percent of polling stations constitutes a generally free and fair election, but T.I.A., I guess.

Burundi’s election body, meanwhile, told the opposition parties to back up their claims of fraud with hard evidence.

Supporters rallying behind the flag of the MSD party, in February.

“You don’t ask for the cancellation of an election for the sake of it,” Prosper Ntahorwamiye, the electoral board spokesman, told AFP on Thursday.

“You have to give tangible and irrefutable evidence that there is fraud that puts the results to doubt.”

Observers from a local group, the Coalition of Civil Society for Monitoring the Elections (COSOME), seemed likewise satisfied with the outcome.

“Our observers reported cases of voting officials who entered with ballot boxes and we also saw the power cuts in certain voting stations, but there were political agents and observers with torches,” said the group’s president, Jean-Marie Kavumbagu.

COSOME said the election had generally gone well despite some hitches, including voting stations opening late, ballot paper shortages, party officials trying to influence queuing voters and inadequate voting booths.

“But I must say that on the whole, the election went well and these irregularities were not of a nature that could affect the result of the vote,” Kavumbagu said.

With four days to lodge a formal protest – with proof to back up their claims – the ball is now in the opposition’s court.

I am living in Burundi, which is almost funny to say, because if you’d stumbled across this blog at home or at the office or on whatever Apple pleasure device you call your own, you might have felt a sense of ambiguousness, or amorphousness, at what you’re reading. I have used my little digital platform to talk about Angolan oil wealth and Ugandan homosexuals and the heartbreaking sincerity of letters from Malawi, but I haven’t always had a lot to say about Burundi itself – apart from observing that it is a useful butt for jokes that begin with, “If you think [insert impoverished country here] is poor…”; and a comedic foil for anyone hoping to make light of a particularly dire situation (i.e., “At least we’re not in Burundi!”)

Well I, for one, am in Burundi, along with eight million or so other people, most of whom, if my months here are any indication, are probably poor; most likely illiterate; guarded toward their neighbors; skeptical of their leaders; not at all unkind; worried for their children; unsure when the next meal will find them; hopeful, impossibly hopeful; and generally glad to be tilling their soil and drinking their banana beer and making do in whatever thrifty, belt-tightened way, if only there could be a few good leaders and a small dose of good luck to help this country back on the right track.

A good deal of the song sounds something like, 'MSD, MSD, MSDeeeeeee!'

I was at a campaign rally a few weeks back for the Mouvement pour la Solidarité et la Démocratie – Movement for Solidarity and Democracy, or MSD – led by the charismatic and controversial Alexis Sinduhije. The party was opening a new permanence – a permanent office, I suppose – in Bururi province, and during the obligatory flag-raising ceremony a strident, militaristic tune filled the air. Few in the crowd knew the words to the MSD anthem, and I could hardly blame them: the song carried on for six or seven minutes. Between the murmuring and lip-synching, I asked a man beside me to translate the refrain.

“When MSD gets there, the international community will recognize that we are again a country that will rise above our problems and again be a land of milk and honey,” he said. It was, admittedly, not the catchiest tune. But you sort of get the point.

The crowd lip-synchs its support

Say what you will about Burundians, but they sure know how to open a permanence in style!

This is a proud and anxious year for Burundi, which is holding its first direct presidential elections since its 12-year civil war officially ended in 2005. (The 2005 polls brought in a new parliament, which in turn chose former rebel, gospel singer, and football afficionado Pierre “Peter” Nkurunziza to lead the country.) Even after the formal peace was brokered in 2005, the Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL), the last and most recalcitrant of the Hutu rebel groups, continued to wage a small-scale war in the bush. They formally agreed to lay down their arms in 2008; last April, they finally carried through on their promise. Thus 2010 marks the first year since the civil war began in 1993 that no armed factions are at loose in the countryside, and that the government – ostensibly, at least – includes all of this country’s dissonant voices (43 officially recognized political parties, at last count).

Burundi’s past experiences with elections have not always ended well, and have always been surprising. Beginning with the election of the Tutsi nationalist Prince Louis Rwagasore as prime minister in 1961 – won at a time when Burundi’s colonial overlords in Belgium had shifted their allegiances to the country’s Hutu majority – Burundian elections have always defied by the conventional wisdom. Calling for elections in Burundi has, in effect, always been a precursor to defeat.

The lesson for Buyoya: don't hold an election unless you're sure you can fix it

In 1993, when Tutsi strongman Pierre Buyoya called for elections – prompted by a wave of post-Cold War reforms across the continent, and signaling the end of 30 years of Tutsi military rule – he was upended by Melchior Ndadaye, an ethnic Hutu whose brief experiment with reform ended with his murder at the hands of Tutsi extremists from the army. When Ndadaye’s Front pour la Démocratie au Burundi (FRODEBU) party, wayward custodians of the transitional government which brought the civil war to an end, called for elections in 2005, it was the Conseil National pour la Defense de la Démocratie -Forces pour la Defense de la Démocratie (CNDD-FDD) – a rebel group that threatened to return to the bush should they lose – which surprised everyone with a sweeping electoral win. FRODEBU, full of wounded pride, retreated to lick its wounds, and CNDD-FDD suddenly found itself, despite a complete lack of governing experience, at the helm of this tiny, troubled nation.

Incredibly, these men would prove unfit to govern

You can argue that the experiment was doomed to fail – that a party raised and founded on a culture of violence would find the tricky business of politics to be less palatable than their preferred gun-barrel diplomacy. But the Burundians I’ve spoken to all describe those first months as a time of great promise. The war had ended; the corrupt old guard of FRODEBU – tainted by years in power, however neutered – had been swept from office; and the new ruling party – running on a platform of human rights and good governance – had stirred hopes of a fresh start for the country.

The honeymoon was over before it started. Rights groups quickly uncovered a campaign of repression and political violence being carried out at the hands of the ruling party; and the corruption that, to some degree or other, had always played a part in Burundian politics, soon took on the momentum of a runaway train. Describing the disillusionment that set in once the first hopeful signs faded, one restaurant owner in Bujumbura told me, “It was like a dream had been taken away.”

The presidential jet: If found, please return to this address

The scale and audacity of the crimes was shocking, even to the most cynical observers. The presidential plane was sold under bizarre circumstances shrouded in sleaze and secrecy; and the free-for-all became so brazen in recent years that the anti-corruption watchdog OLUCOME, citing $30 million in stolen revenues in the first half of 2009 alone, called graft “a way of life” in Burundi.

“It is the first time that people have stolen more than $30 million at one time,” said Gabriel Rufyiri, the head of OLUCOME, when I met him last week. “That’s the first time in our history that such an amount was stolen. It was the first time that a presidential jet was stolen in view of everyone. And all the criminals are there, and they’re becoming stronger and stronger. They are becoming stronger than the state. We see that corruption is becoming more endemic than before. The corruption is being legitimized by those who were supposed to fight against it.”

Rufyiri, like most outspoken critics of the government, has received numerous threats on his life. He has been imprisoned, according to his own count, “at least five times since 2002.” Twice he has had to flee the country.

In the five years since CNDD-FDD took office, a culture of repression and impunity has come to dominate the political scene. And yet people are oddly hopeful – that particular, African hope that finds even the darkest clouds to have a silvery lining. While the threat of violence remains high around the elections, most believe the prospect of a return to civil war are slim. Nearly 300,000 lives were claimed by that lost decade; the country is only just getting back on its feet.

“The Burundian people are not ready for more war,” a pastor told me.

Today I met a man, Pacifique, who has spent the past 10 years living in Antwerp. He was sitting beside me at Aroma, the café, complaining about the heat (the first time I’d every heard an African pining for the cold of Europe). It was his first visit to Burundi in more than two years, and the difference to him was palpable.

“The mentality is changed,” he said. “In Bwiza” – one of the city’s poorest, liveliest quartiers – “people are doing some trade and commerce. They are talking about some things with politics they were afraid to talk about before.”

Pacifique’s daughter, a placid, pot-bellied little girl, came down the sidewalk and joined us. She planted a kiss on her father’s cheek and unfolded some schoolwork for him to look over.

“I don’t believe in all this politics, Hutu and Tutsi,” he said. “We speak the same language, we are the same people.”

A Somali businessman tells me they found the guy behind last week’s grenade attack in Bujumbura’s central market. Seems he was an employee of Onatel – Burundi’s largest telecom company – but no word on what prompted him to methodically plant a grenade in a package, leave it with a trader, and melt into the crowd before the grenade went off. (This is the story I was told by my friend, which was also reported by the AFP.) Here’s the market in more peaceful times:

Bujumbura's central market

Maybe the perpetrator had a gripe with the jurassic pace of change at the state-run company. Maybe he was just pissed that he, like the rest of us, has hardly been able to send a single text for THE PAST THREE WEEKS.

Whatever prompted the plot, grenade attacks are a sad and tragic fact of life in Burundi. (“When it was the war, this would happen every week,” my Somali friend tells me.) According to the AFP report (linked above),

A total of 616 people were killed by violence in Burundi in 2008, including 133 in grenade attacks, according to the country’s leading human rights group.

The UN Development Programme said there were more than 300 grenade attacks in Burundi in 2008.

I’ve been following the news from Burundi since April, and have read a number of reports of similar attacks. They usually stem from domestic disputes: quarrels between lovers, disputes over land. (“After a decade of civil war and years of daily violence, people have a tendency to resort to violence to solve their differences,” said one government official.)

The ready availability of hand grenades – both the relics of Burundi’s long civil war, and the spillover from neighboring Congo – has made them, according to the AFP, “the weapon of choice for everybody, from petty criminals to disgruntled lovers.”

“For a criminal, the grenade is convenient because it guarantees many people are killed in very little time and allows the perpetrator to vanish without revealing himself,” [local human rights group] Iteka chairman David Nahimana said.

The ease of anonymity – along with a chilling culture of impunity – makes it easy for perpetrators to disappear without a trace. In October, the Burundi Press Agency noted that “at least 10 grenades had exploded in several areas in the administrative centre of Ruyigi province [in the previous month] without any arrest being made.”

AFP reported on this “hand grenade epidemic” in June, noting that the weapons “go for around one dollar on the black market.” Despite a highly publicized disarmament drive which netted nearly 70,000 weapons in the past two years – including 14,000 in a single week in October – this remains a heavily armed country. Most estimates place the number of small arms at somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000. Securing those weapons remains a huge obstacle in the months leading up to this year’s presidential election.

Unfortunately, the seriousness of the government in tackling the problem remains…questionable. Already government-sponsored “youth groups” – militias to me and you – have been putting on shows of strength in rural communes. Opposition parties are retaliating. In November, AFP reported how

Burundi’s main opposition group (FRODEBU) massed youths at a weekend rally, warning that it was preparing to fight fire with fire after accusing the ruling CNDD-FDD of forming a militia ahead of polls.

One opposition politician I spoke to called FRODEBU’s bluff. “They’re using violent words to say we are going to fight,” he said. But it’s a widely known fact that the CNDD has the bulk of the weapons. And the ruling party has already proven its willingness to resort to violence to achieve its ends.

I’d been hoping to report on all of this when I arrived in Burundi last month. The militias seemed especially intriguing. But a friend – an American aid worker – advised me against it, calling it a “very dangerous” story. The biggest problem was that most of the militia activities – usually military drills performed in the street in the early morning hours, euphemistically described as “sports days” – take place in rural areas where security is most tenuous. (On a visit to the rural town of Bururi in mid-December, I apparently managed to sleep through a firefight that woke up the rest of the hotel.) In the collines, things happen. They happen to the poor harassed villagers who face the brunt of daily threats and violence; and they can just as easily happen to nosy foreign journalists who – let’s face it – aren’t exactly war correspondents to begin with. As a travel writer, I tend to spend my time doing things like this:

After all, let’s not forget that the ruling party, CNDD-FDD, is itself a former rebel group, which came in from the bush just in time to win the 2005 election. (According to most commentators, it was the implicit threat of violence – that they would simply return to the bush and restart the war if they lost – that helped bring CNDD to power.) When President Pierre Nkurunziza returned from a trip to Rome in November – both to discuss the plight of the developing world at the World Food Security Summit and have a pow-wow with the Pope – he was asked by a local reporter what he thought of the disturbing rise in youth demonstrations. His deadpan reply – “the youth need sports” – sent a chill down more than a few spines of those present.

The youth need sports.

Which leaves Burundi in a very precarious place ahead of this year’s polls.

“To win against fear is not to take up a weapon,” Alexis Sinduhije, the controversial presidential candidate, once told me. “If you take up a weapon, you already have that fear yourself.

“If you don’t take up a weapon, you will win with the force of your ideas.”